3D Typography - Yorkshire Sculpture Park

3D Typography - Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Upon visiting the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, we were assigned the brief of designing a set of 3D typographical forms, in response to one of the exhibitions or sculptures there at the time. We chose to look at the 'Occasional Geometries" exhibit; a collection of artwork, curated by Rana Begum which celebrates the visual interactions and unintentional collaborations of colour, light, shape and form  produced by arranging these abstract and geometric works in a big room together.

Idea 1

Upon starting the visual development process, an idea  we had was to map out letterforms on a brick wall with tape. This idea was a product of the thought that all the pieces in the exhibit were connected and this could be visually communicated by points being connected with tape or string; connecting the dots. By using a brick wall, we introduced a third dimension to the idea, placed it in a real world setting and made it adhere to a pre-existing grid, much like the strict geometry present in the exhibit. After doing this and taking pictures, I drew over the tape lines on illustrator and laid them on top of each other, creating an abstract mesh of lines with the actual letterforms now lying ambiguously within it. Then when laid on top of images of artwork from the exhibit which also featured a lot of interaction between lines,  I created some visually compelling compositions.

Idea 2

This idea spawned from a train thought very much comparable to the first idea; this time with wrapping string around a fence to spell out the word 'connect'. We decided to create a gif of this and compiled sequential images of this process as each letter was added. Ultimately the end result was not as refined as we'd have liked, so I decided to start working from closer up images of the wool, wrapped around the square grids of the fence. This culminated in me producing a typeset from an image of one of the squares of the fence.

Idea 3

A product of our stream of consciousness exercise at the beginning of the week was an abstract shape which I conceived as a visual expression of the interconnection of the artworks at the Occasional Geometries exhibit. This shape was basically like dots being connected by lines. After experimenting with this imagery using collage and ink, as well as using string  in a more 3D sculptural  form, I started making letterforms with it, I liked the structural possibilities of the shapes formed, even the most vague sequences could be seen as abstract letterforms, this prompted me to make a collage of it, with triangular shapes reminiscent of those at the exhibit as a background. I then scanned  it and created different coloured versions on Photoshop.